Friday, December 19, 2008

Just for fun, let's see how many different synch-topics I can connect the Gremlins movies to... Almost all the links in this post are to other posts about various synchromystic or otherwise symbolic themes. If you're not already familiar with all of them, then please click the links, but I warn you - there's a lot!

Gremlins opens with the familiar Warner Bro's sheild. Gremlins 2 goes a step further by bringing back the long forgotten WB cartoon intro featuring the WB logo and tunnel. The cartoon features WB mainstays, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. The familiar WB cartoon logo includes a "birth canal" stargate of concentric circles, and the Warner Bro's sheild. Then from this tunnel pops out the white rabbit, Bugs, whose prescence hints to us that we are about to take a trip 'down the rabbit hole,' whateverthat might be...

Bugs and Daffy fight over who should be the main guy of the WB logo. The logo consists of golden letters on a blue sheild. One blue shield I'm familiar with, from a recent post, is the Magen David, or Shield of David, also known as the Star of David - the 6-pointed star is shown in blue on the flag of Israel. (Warner Bro's was started by Jewish immigrants from Poland.) Daffy Duck decides to take over as the one who rides the WB logo down the tunnel, but while trying to get situated, he ends up getting stuck in the portal with his butt and legs facing the audience. Daffy's black butt resonates the Black Star or Black Hole of the center of our galaxy. He stands up and is now wearing the portal as a set of rings around his waist.

Another "black star" is the planet saturn which has always been related to the color black, and to death (the stargate/veil we all pass through). Notice in the above picture, Daffy clearly resonates the "lord of the rings," saturn. The Duck, black star, and stargate all remind me of a movie from my childhood, a notorious bomb, Howard the Duck. The antagonist of that movie is played by Jeffrey Jones, seen here in Stay Tuned with blackstar/saturn imagry:

In the first Gremlins movie Gizmo, a Mogwai and the host for the later gremlins, is in the care of an elderly Chinese man who sells various trinkets from the Orient in his small shop in Chinatown, New York. The Chinaman's son sells Gizmo to an inventer who gives him to his son Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) as a Christmas gift. There are 3 rules for taking care of a Mogwai: #1 Don't let them be exposed to bright light, especially sunlight which kills them, #2 Don't get them wet (or else they spawn additional mischevious Mogwai), and #3 Don't feed them after midnight (or else they morph into large green violent gremlins). Also, if a Mogwai has already turned into a Gremlin, and it is then splahsed with water, it will spawn additional Gremlins, instead of Mogwai. The natural language of the Mogwai appears to be that of singing various tones. They are fast learners (like a Ferby) and pick up human language quickly, but are even faster at learning how things work - which is what makes a gremlin so dangerous to a technology dependent world.

The modern idea of the "gremlin" goes back to World War II, where they were blamed for inexplicable malfunctions in aircraft. In Cantonese Chinese, "mogwai" means demon or gremlin. The idea of gremlins has been used in both a Twilight Zone episode ("Nightmare at 20,000 Feet") and the Twilight Zone movie.

Gizmo (zo/oz resonator, also part 2 takes place in NY/OZ) was named by an inventor, presumably after the "gizmos" found in his inventions. It's also interesting to note that the word means "Something whose name is either forgotten or not known." Gizmo must be an alien species, and therefore of unknown origin. If he were a native to Earth, gremlins would have over-run the planet after the first rainfall, then died when the sun rose; he doesn't seem compatible with this planet; though he might be from somewhere deep inside the planet. In part 1, Gizmo is kept inside a locked box. His emergence from it could be seen as a movement into a new dimension, our dimension. In Part 2 Gizmo kept in a small cage, but at the end of the movie he is put back into a box; Gizmo is going back to his world/dimension now, the box is closed and that's the last you see of him.

The first Gremlins film is set during Christmas. Billy Peltzer drives a red Volkswagen Beetle, which is constantly dying; fitting for a solar symbol during winter (red color, and scarab-beetle resonator). The car has a stereo with the name Sapphire XI. Sapphire is a birthstone for September, and XI is the Roman numeral for 11. Also, the radio tunning bar lies between 9 and 11 (9/11):

Billy's dog Barney (real name Mushroom) gets strung up in Christmas lights by the Mogwai which spawn from Gizmo. Billy thinks it was Mrs. Deagle, who hates his dog and threatened to kill it. Mrs. Deagle was intentionally made to reference the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz: "...and your little dog too!" Billy's mother kills most of the original gremlins. Billy decapitates the second to last with a sword from a twin-sword display on their wall, but "Stripe" gets away and jumps into the pool at the YMCA creating hundreds more. Also, Stripe calls Gizmo, "Gizmo-Caca" which is a CC/KK synch, thanks Bartholomew. After wreaking havok all through the small town of Kingston Falls, the gremlins (some wearing Mickey Mouse ears) congregate at the movie theater to watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Snow White happened to be Hitlers favorite movie, and Hitler even owned a copy of Snow White on film reels. He had a private theater in his mountain top retreat which had a view of another mountain which has a long history of folk tales involving dwarves and elves. Gremlins themselves, in folk tradition, were "elf-like creatures." Billy then blows up the movie theater, but Stripe is again safe because he was out getting candy at a department store. Billy and Stripe fight it out through the department store until finally Gizmo opens the blinds revealing sunlight and killing Stripe. The gremlins are gone... for now.

Gremlins is spoofed in Family Guy episode "The Tan Aquatic with Steve Zissou," which references the movie "Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," which features a yellow submarine. In the Family Guy episode, Peter feeds his Mogwai after midnight and it turns into Fran Dressure, who plays Mrs. Levine in TV series Entourage. Peter kills her by stuffing her into the microwave! Fran Dressure is also in Spinal Tap, where she forces the band to change their album cover to what ends up being just a plain black square - saturn symbol.

Gremlins references many movies, including The Howling via a smiley face on the fridge. The smiley face topic at the synchromysticism forum sees the smiley face as a death omen, and here in Gremlins 1 the smiley face is seen as Billy gets chicken to feed the Mogwai after midnight, which turns them into the violent gremlins. The town's theatre marquee is showing a double bill: "A Boy's Life" (the working title for Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial), and "Watch the Skies" (the working title for Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The theater, which gets blown up, is the same theater which Michael J. Fox (as Marty McFly in Back to the Future) smashes into with Doc Browns vehicular time machine (after lightning is harnessed to send the time machine 'back to the future'). In the first Gremlins movie the inventor who buys Gizmo, Mr. Peltzer, goes to an inventors convention where someone in the background disappears in a working time machine (the same one from the movie, Time Machine). Could I get any more stargate resonating themes from this movie? Probably not, so moving on...

The opening aerial shot of New York City was stock footage from Superman.

"New York New York, the city so nice they named it twice" - Brain Gremlin

In Gremlins 2, we meet up again with Billy Peltzer who has moved to New York to work as an artist for industrialist Daniel Clamp. He is living in an apartment with his now girlfriend Kate, and they are expecting a visit from their old friends the Fudderman's who survived the havok in Kingston Falls in part 1. I didn't mention it, but Mr. Fudderman is the source for Billy's naming of the green monsters "gremlins," because M. Fudderman kept going on about foreigners putting gremlins in various pieces of technology like his snow plow and television. Gizmo is back in Chinatown living with the ailing Chinese shop owner who is resisting being bought out by Clamp, who is buying up all of New York City as part of his building projects.

The Clamp Tower, and other branches of Clamp indusries, such as the Clamp Cable Network (3,3,14(5) =11), use the octagonal "C" with Earth being squeezed by the "clamp." Looks to me like Earth is either going into, or being shot out of, the octagonal stargate. The building's address is 101, and the number can be seen on the outside as well as right inside on a "lightning bolt" zig-zag shape.

The old shop owner eventually dies and the building is demolished and Gizmo escapes into an alley. Here Gizmo is found by indentical twins who work in the Clamp tower, in an office that does genetic research:

The Clamp Tower is like the smart building in I, Robot; you give it a command and it will open a door, turn on a light, or move an elevator. However, the building is riddled with "bugs in the system" and everything keeps malfunctioning. It's a monument to Man's ego. The character of Clamp was based on all the typical super-ego personas like Donald Trump and Ted Turner. Billy's power hungry supervisor is named Marla Bloodstone, who is named for Marla Maples, Trumps (ex-)wife. By the end of the movie, Clamp has decided he doesn't want to make super-towers anymore, but places for people, like Billy's small town of Kingston Falls:

Billy Peltzer: Sir, I'm... I'm sorry about the building.Daniel Clamp: I'm not.Kate Peltzer: You're not?Daniel Clamp: For one thing, we're insured for the damages. For another, maybe it wasn't a place for people anyway. It was a place for things. You make a place for things... things come.

All the Gremlin activity, with one excetion, takes place inside the Clamp tower. Gizmo is brought inside by the twins from the genetic research lab, kept inside by Billy who hides him in his desk, and then he is splashed with water by a janitor who is trying to fix a water fountain. (Janitor from Janus: doors, gateways.. It is also the turning point in the movie when he splashes Gizmo and creates new Mogwai.)

When Kate arrives in Billy's office looking for Gizmo, she finds mogwai Daffy (named for Daffy Duck) on the top of the Clamp Tower model playing with some airplane toys located over him. This is a homage to King Kong. (Sorry, I didn't get a picture!). The other new Mogwai venture out into the building and eventually find food (after midnight) at a yogurt stand named Penguins, where one pops out of a bowl of what might be M&M's.

Very soon after, there are gremlins tearing through the many electronical componants of the building. A fire alarm is set off and all the people flee the tower, but because it is still daylight, the gremlins stay inside and wait for night.

In the genetic laboratory, the green-skinned (Osiris/Nature representing?) gremlins find out that they can morph into new gremlin-beings by ingesting genetic material from plants and animals. One drinks a "vegetable medly" elixer and sprouts a garden on his body. One drinks some spider DNA and becomes a huge spider-gremlin, and another drinks and elixer of bat DNA and grows bat wings. This is similar to another alien species, specifically the one in the Alien movie franchise. They take on some characteristics of their hosts, like the dog-alien in Alien 3. All the aliens in that movie are male except for the queen who produces eggs. All the gremlins are male, except for one who drinks a DNA elixer of male+female DNA and becomes a female (or perhaps a hermaphrodite?). They also "grow" accessories such as glasses for the Brain Gremlin, and a long coat for the "flasher" Gremlin. The bat-gremlin is also injected with genetic sunblock and is the only gremlin who ventures outside of the building in the movie. He actually buzzes Mr. Fudderman who is in New York visiting Billy. Mr. Fudderman takes his revenge on the gremlins by pushing this one into a pit of wet concrete. The bat-gremlin then flies to near-by Cathedral of Saint Eva Marie, and rests on an outcropping like a gargoyle.

stargate over the Twin Towers from a Gargoyle cartoonimage from The Blob

Gremlins2=9 TheNewBatch=11, 9-11. The title is shown over the Twin Towers in the movies opening credits, already pictured (Thanks Adam). In one of the first shots inside Clamp tower, we see a bank of televisions inside the Clamp Cable Network studio, and above this is a clock with it's hands very near the 9 and 11. After people flee the building, the other news networks start to flock to the building to see what's up. Two news crews show up from channels 9 and 11.

Inside the Clamp building, late night movie host "Grandpa Fred," Dracula, (played by "Grandpa" from TV's The Munsters) see's the chaos as his oppertunity to live out his dream as a news correspondant and grabs a Japanese tourist to be his cameraman. Earlier in the film we see Dracula filming a part of his show where he introduces "B-movie" sci-fi flick called The Attack of the Octopus People, which is a real movie called, Octaman. Grandpa Fred wears an Octagonal medal around his neck.

As Grandpa Fred broadcasts, and even interviews the Brain Gremlin, Daniel Clamp prepares for the end times. He pops a video tape into a VCR and plays a tape which was pre-made for the end of the world:

Building Announcement: Because of the end of civilization, the Clamp Cable Network now leaves the air. We hope you've enjoyed our programming, but more importantly, we hope you've enjoyed... life.

From imdb.com: "The uplifting end of the world video scene was included by the filmmakers when they find out that one the news networks actually have such a video prepared to run in case of the end of the world. This video apparently still exists and still ready to run at the final hour."(There are also tapes for deaths of presidents, major disasters, etc.)

At some point in the movie, the gremlins "take over the movie projector" so for a live audience watching the movie when it came out, it would seem that something was wrong with the movie. (Similar to Fight Club where Tyler Durder reminds us that we are not our fucking khakis while it appears the movie projector is messed up.) Then you see gremlins doing shadow-puppets in front of the projector light onto the silver screen. One of the puppets is a rabbit (Bug Bunny again?), fitting for the cross-over of the Gremlins through the silver screen and "into reality," and the other shadow puppet is a profile of Abraham Lincoln, complete with top hat. Why Lincoln? Good question. Phoebe Cate's character, "Kate" in Gremlins spoofs her sad Christmas memory from part one with another sad memory about something that happened on Lincoln's Birthday. In both movies she is harassed by the flasher gremlin, and was apparently flashed when she was a little girl by a man who looked a lot like Abraham Lincon. In Fast Time at Ridgemont High, which also stars Phoebe Cates, their rival schools name is Lincoln High. In Fight Club, Tyler Durder says that the famous person he would fight would be Abe Lincoln. In the new Batman sequel, the police have a list of possible people who could be Batman which is just three pictures: one is of Bigfoot and another - Abraham Lincoln! Abe's assasination is part of a fake "Mentos" commercial in Family Guy, the show which also had a Mogwai sketch. What is the deal with Abe Lincoln references? Anybody? Moving on... The gremlins then put on an old black and white movie which has the title screen: "Sunworshipper Films Presents Vollyball Holiday," a movie about semi-nude, or nude women who play vollyball and go swimming. (Other black and white elements are present in Gremlins such as the "referee" style shirts the waitresses wear in a sports bar in the Clamp building. And when Billy is arrested for trying to shut off the buildings water supply, he is bailed out at the same time that a truck load of mimes is getting arrested.)

Anyways, a movie patron and WWF product placement, Hulk Hogan, stands up and rips off his shirt and tells the gremlins to put the movie back on before he has to kick their asses. In the VHS version of this film, it looks like the VCR or tape is broken instead of a movie screen when the gremlins take over, and this time it is John Wayne who convinces the gremlins to continue the film. Wayne had been dead for 11 years when this was made so they impersonated his voice.

Other interesting things happen before the end. Early on, gremlins ransack Microwave Marge's cooking show, probably a reference to the famous scene of the gremlin which was killed by a microwave in part one. Marge has a hexagonal "atomic" symbol on her apron.

She is also one of maybe 3 redheads in the movie. Another redhead is Billy's supervisor, Marla Bloodstone, who has a gold necklace of a left eye (and part of the face); bloodstones are worn to ward off the evil eye, same purpose as her necklace showing an eye.

Marla and left-eye necklaceMarla with Jolt cola (lightning bolt logo)

She gets caught in a spiderweb made by a spider-gremlin, reminding me of yet another redhead: Mary Jane from Spiderman who rests in a spiderweb. Marla and Kate are saved from the spider-gremlin when Gizmo, imitating Rambo (or Sagittarius), fires and exploding arrow at it, blowing up the spider-gremlin. The spider is eight-legged, and resonates with octopuses, octagonal-stargates, and the heart of the Milky Way and holy grail.

note the 8-legged "bug""bugs" in the system, or "gremlins" in the center of the spiral galaxy?note the all seeing eye

At the end, the plan is to trick the gremlins into thinking it's nighttime so they gather in the lobby, then drop the curtains and kill them all with sunlight. Some clouds come in at just the wrong time and ruin that plan, so Billy has to soak them all and kill them with a gremlin which had been turned into electricity. The gremlins are a really strange bunch of creatures. They grow/multiply in water, but sunlight kills them. They seem almost virus or bacteria like, and they change when drinking the DNA elixers in a lab headed by a scientist obsessed with germs.

Are gremlins just destructive perfect "killing machines" (or machine killers?), like the aliens in the Alien movies? Do they represent a "ghost in the machine," making a mockery of all things made by Man? At the end of part one, the elderly chinese shop owner takes Gizmo back and tells Billy that he is not yet ready, not responsible enough, to care for a Mogwai. Or is it that Man is not yet in control of his demons, and not yet ready to move to the next level of universal responsibility? Some people think it's silly to find all these "synchs" in movies and shows, and is a waste of time. Playing "devil's advocate" I deliberately tried to put as many synch-links in this post as I could, as a kind of comment on just finding synchs and forgetting to find meaning in them. I believe that when the student is ready - the master will appear; which is to say that one can learn great realizations in any moment or activity, but you must be open to it. So, does it really matter how you come to the realization that all things and people are connected, whether it's via synchromystic investigations, LSD, deep meditation, volunteering in your community or whatever? Every-thing could be a teacher if you're willing to be the student, so don't pass up those "a-ha moments" I sometimes get while writing my "waste of time" blog posts!